A Taxing Death (Jill Quint, MD, Forensic Pathologist Series Book 5)

by Peche, Alec

  "Until this recent crime spree where he is suspected of killing four people, he appears to have what I would call a mild criminal background in light of the capabilities we know him to have based on his Army training," Lieutenant Moss observed. "So we know he's been a sovereign citizen for some twenty years and during those twenty years he may have wanted to end the lives of what he considered to be fake employees managed by an illegal state. That's been his normal behavior for much of his life. However, several weeks to months ago he formed a bond with another sovereign citizen and he turned violent and I suspect there is no putting this genie back in the bottle. He may feel very self-satisfied with the pain and damage he has caused the state government by his actions."

  "I would have to add that his hacking abilities are extraordinary. He has managed to remove his identity from all major government and military systems," Jill asserted. "I suspect he has also used that knowledge to get into computer systems that contain medical information. Those same skills may have given him the knowledge of how to make changes to a defibrillator such that the electricity administered electrocuted its victims."

  "I am new to this case, and two facts disturbed me here," Agent Ortiz stated. "We still don't have any identity on his partner despite the fact that we have a picture of him; and if someone was going to bomb the Department of Revenue, when and what would be the target?"

  "Most people that use bombs, bomb an event or bomb a location, “announced the profiler with the Sacramento Police Department.

  Detective Chang asked, "How many buildings in the city of Sacramento is the Department of Revenue located in? Do you have any other large buildings across the state that house employees?"

  The expert from personnel said, "They are in two buildings in Sacramento – the Capitol and the town center which is on the south end of town. We also have a location in the San Francisco Bay Area and three in Southern California.”

  Another person in the room spoke up and Jill had forgotten who he represented. “Are bomb making substances available for anyone to purchase? Where would he get the supplies to build a bomb?"

  Since Jill's computer was still hooked up to the projector she said, "I think I’ll try to buy the supplies over the internet. I'm going to Google what is in a bomb and then I'm going to see if I can buy those substances. Why don't the rest of you continue with the discussion?”

  Within five minutes, Jill and the rest of the conference room had their answers. Bomb making supplies were readily available on the internet and could be delivered in twenty-four hours. It was a scary reality to be so visible on the screen.

  The personnel expert had silently been giving thought to major meetings in the department while the conversation continued. He had attended many of the leadership meetings and had begun writing down the major meetings that he could think of and then it struck him what meeting would be the target.

  "Folks, if I was a crazy maniac killer and I wanted to go after one of the major meetings of the department where a lot of the leadership are present, I would go after the oversight board of the Department of Revenue. It meets quarterly and the next meeting is next week in the auditorium at the town center complex. The board members and all the senior leaders of the Department of Revenue are present for that meeting. By law, the meeting is open to the public and it actually invites public participation. So a stranger could get into the room relatively easy. There is security on the building, but it makes a very good target."

  Lieutenant Moss responded, "Mr. Kelling, that's a very good guess and I would have to agree with you that that meeting makes a good target. We do have security on that building, but I think I'll operate on the assumption that there will be a plot to bring explosives to that meeting and act accordingly."

  Jill added, "Lieutenant Moss, if I were Mr. Hull, I would visit the building to look at the setup. Do you have cameras on that building and at all entrances? If you do, it would behoove us to view the video looking for suspects. Detective Chang, Officer Tennyson offered to help and she certainly was a great aid in speeding up our viewing of the other city video footage. If you would loan us her right now I'm sure we could go to wherever the video feed is and not only look to see if he's been there, but probably set up a notification system for the next time the facial recognition software finds a match in a visitor’s face. Also back to Agent Ortiz's comment, despite numerous searches we have been unable to identify Mr. Hull's accomplice. From the video, we know he's an African-American, medium height, somewhere between the ages of 30 and 40 but that's all we have on him so far. We've made significant progress in identifying Mr. Hull but it has not led us any closer to the identity of the second suspect. Does anyone have any suggestions for us?"

  Ideas were tossed out for the next quarter of an hour and with each suggestion, Marie had an answer as to the results of the suggested search. One of the agents that accompanied agent Ortiz offered a suggestion that Marie found intriguing. She went to work on it as the conversation continued around her on how to protect the employees of the Department of Revenue. Detective Chang interrupted the conversation to inform Jill that Officer Tennyson was ready to meet them to view the video feed. Lieutenant Moss indicated that the feed was kept at the town center security office. As he was anxious to take a look at a potential bombing target, he brought the meeting to a close and offered to escort Jill and Marie to the large government complex.

  On the drive over, Jill asked Marie, "So what are you searching for next, I saw your lightbulb go on in the meeting."

  "I was going to ask Heather to take the two faces and see if either of them visited the Department of Revenue to discuss an issue they had with their taxes. If we could focus on a certain time, I felt we could go back and figure out what taxpayer name they filed under. We'll need some help from the department for them to give us names and I don't know much about the law, but this somehow feels like it would need a search warrant in order for us to obtain the information."

  "Marie, those are some brilliant ideas! Once we arrive at this building we'll have a conversation with the Lieutenant to see if he can get the ball rolling tonight. If we could get dinner delivered to us somewhere we could put another four or five hours into searching for these two guys. I would guess he'd have the warrant in and under thirty minutes, but then we need the right department representative to match who they interviewed versus who was on camera and finding the right person might take some time."

  "Sounds like a plan! It's going to be a long night ahead with no dinner cooked by Nathan, just a sad day all the way around," said Marie with a pout.

  "Is his cooking the only reason you came west?"

  "No….. I came to drink your wine as well!"

  When they pulled into the parking lot of the town center complex they heard that Heather would not arrive for another five minutes so Jill took the opportunity –to ask the lieutenant for his help in getting a search warrant, and providing the critical department contact so they could continue the search into the night. He had just finished making calls to line up resources for Jill and Marie when Heather arrived on her motorcycle. They briefed Heather on the progress of the case and their thoughts about a potential board meeting being bombed the following week. They also discussed their approach for identifying the second suspect. She jumped right in offering to help. Her short exposure to the two women had informed her that she would learn a lot working with them on solving this murder and it was concrete experience she could mention when she applied for the detective's exam.

  The lieutenant arranged for a tour of the security check area as well as the auditorium. The four of them stayed quiet in front of the security guard but they looked into each other's eyes and knew their thoughts were on 'what a perfect target the auditorium made!' After the short tour they adjourned to the security office where the monitors for the building were housed. Heather began working her magic running the video feed through the facial recognition software and they almost immediately got a hit.

  "That loo
ks like Thomas Hull going through security," Marie noted. "I don't see the second suspect with him. Do you have a day and time for this visit? Do you have cameras that follow him out to the parking lot and watch him get in a vehicle?"

  "The visit occurred about four hours ago. Cameras don't follow him beyond the security check point. I wonder where he went inside the building. We need to call that security guard at home and see if he remembers the conversation he had with your suspect," Heather paused and then apologized to the lieutenant. "Sorry Lieutenant Moss, sir, I didn't mean to suggest that you should follow my orders."

  Jill really liked the lieutenant when he said to Heather, "Not a problem Officer as I agree with what you suggested. The Sacramento Police Department is lucky to have you among their ranks. Why don't you continue with the search while I track down the security guard?"

  Heather continued to search, but they saw no further visits by their suspect or his accomplice. Heather then took a look to see if they could follow the suspect out to the parking lot. There was a camera on the exterior of the building that showed him walking outside the building. But the range of the camera failed to cover most of the parking lot. Heather looked around at the other video feeds and found nothing. She then went outside to look at cameras posted on the building across the street, she also looked at the street lights to see if they had cameras on them. They might have some options in that area, but she was more interested in moving on to the actual Department of Revenue visits by the public.

  For a variety of reasons, the Department met its citizens individually to discuss their tax situation. Perhaps the conversation was about an audit, or maybe an incorrectly completed tax form, or maybe a taxpayer wanted to protest a penalty. Their plan was to go back two to six months and run all visitor faces from locations that met with the public through the facial recognition software looking for a match to their two suspects. Given the elaborate charade around three of the four murders, it took some planning and practice on the suspect's part to get it right. Some interaction with the office became the ignition switch where the suspects as sovereign citizens felt that the Department of Revenue had overstepped their authority. A deadly force response was required and Jill estimated that the plan and the partnership of the two men might have taken at least two months to form. Regardless, if they found nothing in their target time span they could always enlarge it on either side. The footage of a month took about fifteen minutes to run through the facial recognition program so it wasn't a terrible waste of time if they had to add additional months.

  Fortunately they did not have to drive to the actual office location to view the film as the video footage storage was all centralized to their present location, it being the largest location housing Department of Revenue staff. Heather switched to the location which was geographically about three miles away and began to bring up the archived footage. They started with the most recent month first and found no matches to their two suspects and again had the same result for the next month. However at four months out the suspect who was not identified yet visited the branch office. The camera footage showed him entering and exiting the building with perhaps a ninety minute stay inside the building. His expression in both directions would be what Jill would describe as grim. They now had their time period for the lieutenant to use to gain a search warrant for that office. They watched the video a second time counting the number of people that entered the building after their suspect and there were about eighteen visitors that they would potentially have to sort through to find the name on the tax return of their suspect.

  The three women were really excited with this finding. Jill high-fived Heather for her expertise with the video system and high-fived Marie for coming up with the idea. The lieutenant had returned to watch their search and was already on the phone to a judge seeking the search warrant which he was granted after a ten minute conversation. As tax returns contained no reference to race, the only reduction in the number of tax returns for them to review was gender. They could eliminate tax returns with female names on them. Marie, using social media and Heather, using the driver's license database, should give them the means to zero in on their suspect's tax return. In the interim, Jill was running additional months through the software to see if there were any further visits by either suspect. Within fifteen minutes, they had eliminated all but two. Now they just needed the IT person to arrive to tell them what was on the two returns that might be indicative of a sovereign citizen.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Allen and Jerome arrived back at Jerome's apartment after they had surveyed the auditorium where the last meeting of the Department of Revenue Board would be held next week. It would be the Board's last meeting as it was their intent to kill everyone present at the meeting. But first they wanted to look at how they had erred and not made the deaths look like natural causes. It was best to study your failures so you did not repeat them going forward for the next mission.

  "Allen, it's a good thing you have such brilliant computer skills," Jerome praised. "I feel like you can go anywhere and look at anyone's secrets in a computer system. Where do you think you should go first to figure out how they knew that the deaths were murders?"

  "I was thinking about that on the drive back and I think I should go to the medical examiner's office first and see what is in the autopsy reports. I'm going to access the El Dorado office first as I think the smaller the office, the easier it is to gain access to it."

  Within half an hour, Allen had managed to infiltrate the medical examiner's server where he noted that there were two autopsy reports.

  "This is interesting; there are two autopsy reports on the server and they appear to be about a week apart. Let me pull up both reports and see what the difference is." Allen paused to read the document."Okay the first report states that the cause of death was an allergic reaction, the mode of death is natural causes, and it's signed by the medical examiner. The second report says the body was exhumed, the cause of death is electrocution and the mode is a homicide, and it's signed by Jill Quint, M.D. with a co-signature of the same medical examiner. Who is Jill Quint, M.D.?"

  "Allen, why don't you pull up the other autopsy reports from the County of Sacramento and I'll research Jill Quint," Jerome offered.

  Another forty-five minutes went by with Jerome compiling enough information on Jill Quint to almost create a dossier, while it took Allen some time to gain access to the medical examiner's office operated by the County of Sacramento. Once he did and read the three autopsy reports, he turned and looked at Jerome.

  "We need to add this Dr. Quint to our murder list. She's the one who convinced both medical examiners that the mode of death was homicide. What did you find out about her, Jerome?"

  "There's quite a lot about her but here's a summary. She was a forensic pathologist with the state crime lab five years ago when she quit and opened a consulting practice offering a second opinion on the cause of death. She's been involved with several high profile cases. She has a very bland website with contact information on it. She also has a vineyard about an hour south of here in the central valley and she actually did a press conference outside the gate to her property about a year ago. It appears that besides doing the autopsy that she provides investigative services as well. I found her home address and I looked it up on Google Earth. It's nice and isolated so we should be able to go after her there. She seems really smart and perhaps we might do a favor to our brothers and sisters in the sovereign citizen movement to eliminate her. Although I must say that Jill Quint had a case about a year ago in San Francisco; she took down an ex-politician that stole from the city coffers which is consistent with our belief system."

  "Dr. Quint stills needs to die. Remember, her actions are likely what caused the state to hide its Department of Revenue employees from us which is preventing us from completing our original mission."

  "The website says that she does investigative services; do you think she's helping the police find us?"

  "
I don't know and I would have to spend a lot of time searching through multiple agencies to figure out if she is assisting them. Let's just assume she is and plan the kill at night on her property. This time I don't care if the authorities figure out it's murder. We could head there tonight and do surveillance on her property for practice and then strike tomorrow night. How do you want to kill her?"

  "I like the Taser to immobilize her and then we can either electrocute her or gas her with nitrogen. I don't like to use knives or guns. Our method of killing is quicker and gentler. If we have to hike into her vineyard it's easier to carry a small nitrogen gas cylinder than for us to return to the storage shed and get the defibrillator."

  "Okay, surveillance tonight then we will take her out tomorrow night," Allen agreed. "Let's move on to planning for next week. I'll upload the pictures I took so you can view the area I'm talking about. Ideally we would just leave a backpack in this auditorium with the timer on it and be ten miles away at the time it detonates. But the likelihood of that happening is small."

  "What is the interior like in the auditorium? Is it movie theater seating? Could we tape something to the underside of a chair in that room? But maybe I should back up first – how big a package are we talking about? Give me a sense of how much explosives and what size they are so I can understand what we need to leave behind in that auditorium."

  "I'm going to have to build the bomb from scratch and I have to make sure I order the supplies today so they reach us by tomorrow or the next day at the latest. I haven't touched explosives in nearly twenty years so I'll want to go over them extensively before I build the perfect bomb for next week."